Oh, I fully agree with your argument as it applies to the old ant build tool, which is in fact a programming language using XML serialization - the author even

Oh, I fully agree with your argument as it applies to the old ant build tool, which is in fact a programming language using XML serialization - the author even apologized for it when he realized syntax wasn't the hard part. But a maven pom.xml is actually a component model serialization rather than a programming language in disguise - unless you're referring to embedded ant scripts in maven files which is a thing, but not common enough to warrant criticism IMO. Scripted deployment tasks in a Java context were more commonly seen in Jenkins, and only recently spill into gradle build scripts (I've always thought gradle was following Jenkins' Groovy syntax for eventual integration but that hasn't happened).